My friend Rhett Smith asked me on twitter yesterday where he should start if he wanted to get into some of Žižek’s writings. There are a few different places to start because he has such a huge corpus and covers a variety of topics. For instance the different areas of his work you can dive into are:

  1. Christianity
  2. Politics
  3. Psychoanalysis
  4. Film Criticism
  5. Hegalian Philosophy

He was interested in learning more about his use of Psychoanalysis, which is almost solely based on Jacques Lacan’s work. Here are my recommendations on this particular subject, if you’d like to chime in about the others please feel free ((all these links have embedded referral codes in them to Powell’s independent bookstore in Portland Oregon. I strongly support local bookstores and hope you will too. If you purchase these books through these links I also receive a little  kickback from the sale)):

Finally, If you’re interested in getting books that cover the four main pillars of Žižek’s thought: Hegel, Lacan, Marx and Christianity then I highly recommend the four volume: The Essential Zizek: The Complete Set (the Sublime Object of Ideology, the Ticklish Subject, the Fragile Absolute, the Plague of Fantasies).

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  1. There is also a ton of stuff on YouTube of him talking. Most of them are fairly lucid but occasionally his accent is difficult to understand on poor recordings (is that a lateral lisp I hear?). I'm finding Violence very accessible, if only I had more time to read and is an entry point to some of his more popular themes.

  2. I'm more interested in his discourse on christianity and so i started with a couple papers, went to On Belief, Fragile Absolute, Puppet and the Dwarf, Parallax View, and am currently working through The Monstrosity of Christ.
    I'm not sure i would recommend that exact progression, but it was good to get a good feel of everything he focuses on while pinpointing his writings on christianity.